Forbes CommunityVoice™ allows professional fee-based membership groups ("communities") to connect directly with the Forbes audience by enabling them to create content – and participate in the conversation – on the Forbes digital publishing platform. Each topic-based CommunityVoice™ is produced and managed by the group.

Opinions expressed within Forbes CommunityVoice™ are those of the participating individuals.

Why You Should Think Twice About Your Work Output

Founder and Chief Science Officer at Opternative, the first online vision test that delivers a glasses/contacts Rx

Shutterstock

Why does output matter? In your personal life, it’s a significant way to track how you are improving on a daily basis. At work, it matters because a boss is tracking your performance to ensure you are hitting your goals.

When looking at an entire workforce, however, output doesn’t always increase based on the total amount of time an employee is supposed to put into their daily tasks. It’s much more complex.

Historical trends show that employee output per hour has doubled every 35 years or so. It doubled from 1930 to 1960 and then again from 1960 to 1998.What caused this trend? Technological innovations like radio communication, typewriters, computers, tablets, the World Wide Web and many others.

Technology has increased productivity, but it also has increased the amount of information consumed on a daily basis, which leads to higher levels of distraction. To complicate things further, an employee’s life circumstances also directly affect the level of output they provide to a work environment. My business, Opternative, like other growing companies, learned a number of lessons throughout its growth. Early on, the output level of employees wasn't one of our highest priorities. Looking back on it now, I see that should have been a much bigger focus.

When examining your current workforce, either the team you are managing or the team members you are working with, do you feel the outputs of all individuals are the same? Probably not. Here are some examples of how life circumstances can greatly affect the work output of an employee.

Employee A is a family man with four children and a fifth on the way. He leads his company’s user research team and manages two research consultants. He values spending time with his family and cannot be expected to make his company’s projects a top priority.

If you examine the things that fill Employee A’s mind in a 24-hour period, it’s 45 percent family care, 35 percent personal financial investments, 10 percent self-focused activities and 10 percent company tasks. This means during an eight-hour workday, he will only give 48 minutes of pure focus on company initiatives, while the rest of his time is filled with other thoughts.

Employee B, a recent college graduate, is highly motivated to build a successful career path. He recently joined a startup as a business development manager and he aspires to grow his career within the company. He, like many others, has a lot of student debt and is living minimally in a low-cost apartment.

In a 24-hour period, Employee B’s mind is filled with 80 percent company tasks, 10 percent self-focused activities and 10 percent hobbies. This means he gives six hours and 24 minutes of his focus towards work during an eight-hour workday.

While these are two examples are drastically different, they help illustrate how the output of a single individual can differ depending on their life circumstances.

The examples can also be broken down further to analyze the cost for the company. For simplicity's sake, let’s say both employees both earn $20,000 a year. Let’s also assume they work eight-hour days, five days a week earning $76.92 per day. However, Employee A only puts in 48 minutes of focused work time in during a given day, while Employee B puts in 6 hours and 24 minutes. That means Employee A is being actually earning $96.15 per hour and Employee B is only earning $12.01 per hour.

This cost ratio may seem unfair. But in some cases, it’s OK because the talent and value an employee brings to their work is another important factor in measuring output. However, in other situations, using an output analysis can help determine the key team members to keep and those who should transition out of the company.

One way to address this discrepancy would be to review each team member based on their expected output (revenue from international partners, impressions to website per day, etc.) and track their performance over time. Next, gauge their overall time commitment to work based on a scale of 1 to 3, with 3 being the largest commitment and 1 being the least. Then use the following formula to determine an employee's efficiency: [(actual output per day)*(time commitment rating)/3] /8.

So, for instance, an actual output of 1,000 impressions in a day with a rating of 2 for time commitment would be: 1000*2/3/8 = 83.33 impressions per hour. This result can then be used to compare against other employees who are working on similar projects.

Employers tend to think about employee output as a linear function, which oversimplifies the equation. Instead, they need to think about a three-dimensional graph with the y-axis representing the total output, the x-axis representing the time in years and the z-axis representing the percentage of focus each employee gives to their job. This will give companies a much more qualitative representation of their employee’s actual output.

Output is vital to the success of any work environment, but especially to startups like the one I founded. It’s important for us to ensure each employee is maximizing their contributions to our company’s goals. By understanding the key variables involved in measuring an employee’s output, we have been able to accurately assess their true value to our company.